Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books.
There are many issues with scholarly communication, which include author rights, the peer review process, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing (including open access and institutional repositories), rights and access to federally funded research and preservation of intellectual assets.
Other textual formats used include preprints and working papers, reports, encyclopedias, dictionaries, data and visualisations, blogs and discussion forums.
Many publications have begun to offer incentives to scholarly researchers to publish their data and have developed the necessary infrastructure in support of e-research.
[6] Other sensitive information that should be protected include data that if it were disclosed would have a significant likelihood to cause psychological, social, emotional, physical, or reputation harm.
Through these types of programs, librarians have established their role relative to the structure of the library organization by formalizing the discussion of these issues in research and e-learning activities.
Publications such as PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports follow an author pay model, where the peer review and publishing service are provided for a one time cost to the writer.
To advance research in this area and to produce sustainable publication tools, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded a cohort of projects based on university campuses and at academic presses "to change scholarly practice in ways that advance teaching, research, preservation, and publication.
"[13] Recent technological developments, such as open access and institutional repositories at universities are seen as vehicles for changing or improving the scholarly communication process.
The growing dominance of publishing conglomerates in scientific, technical, and medical fields, and to some degree in the social sciences, is of special concern to information professionals.
Scholars, often indifferent to rights issues, transfer copyright to for-profit publishers, frequently for reports of research funded wholly or partially at public expense.